The first thing that struck him was the choking odor. The next, the two green red-headed eagles that closed in on him. One spoke in a voice like a giant parrot’s and ordered him to march on ahead. He did so, noting at the same time that the batfaces must have removed his knife. The weapon would not have done him much good. The cave was thronged with the birds, each of which towered above him.
Against one wall were two cages made of thin iron bars. In one was a group of six gworl. In the other was a tall well-built youth wearing a deerskin breechcloth. He grinned at Wolff and said, “So you made it! How you’ve changed!”
Only then did the reddish-bronze hair, long upper lip, and craggy but merry face become familiar. Wolff recognized the man who had thrown the horn from the gworl-besieged boulder and who called himself Kickaha.
CHAPTER SIX
Wolff did not have time to reply, for the cage door was opened by one of the eagles, who used his foot as effectively as a hand. A powerful head and hard beak shoved him into the cage; the door ground shut behind him.
“So, here you are,” Kickaha said in a rich baritone voice. “The question is, what do we do now? Our stay here may be short and unpleasant.”
Wolff, looking through the bars, saw a throne carved out of rock, and on it a woman. A half-woman, rather, for she had wings instead of arms and the lower part of her body was that of a bird. The legs, however, were much thicker in proportion than those of a normal-sized Earth eagle. They had to support more weight, Wolff thought, and he knew that here was another of the Lord’s laboratory-produced monsters. She must be the Podarge of whom Ipsewas had spoken.
From the waist up she was a woman whom few men are privileged to see. Her skin was white as a milky opal, her breasts superb, the throat a column of beauty. The hair was long and black and straight and fell on both sides of a face that was even more beautiful than Chryseis’s, an admission that he had not thought possible to evoke from him.
However, there was something horrible in the beauty: a madness. The eyes were fierce as those of a caged falcon teased beyond endurance.
Wolff tore his eyes from hers and looked about the cave. “Where is Chryseis?” he whispered.
“Who?” Kickaha whispered back.
With a few quick sentences, Wolff described her and what had happened to him.
Kickaha shook his head. “I’ve never seen her.”
“But the gworl?”
“There were two bands of them. The other must have Chryseis and the horn. Don’t worry about them. If we don’t talk our way out of this, we’re done for. And in a very hideous way.”
Wolff asked about the old man. Kickaha replied that he had once been Podarge’s lover. He was an aborigine, one of those who had been brought into this universe shortly after the Lord had fashioned it. The harpy now kept him to do the menial work which required human hands. The old man had come at Podarge’s order to rescue Wolff from the batfaces, undoubtedly because she had long ago heard from her pets of Wolff’s presence in her domain.
Podarge stirred restlessly on her throne and unfolded her wings. They came together before her with a splitting noise like distant lightning.
“You two there!” she shouted. “Quit your whispering! Kickaha, what more do you have to say for yourself before I loose my pets?”
“I can only repeat, at the risk of seeming tiresome, what I said before!” Kickaha replied loudly. “I am as much the enemy of the Lord as you, and he hates me, he would kill me! He knows I stole his horn and that I’m a danger to him. His Eyes rove the four levels of the world and fly up and down the mountains to find me. And …”
“Where is this horn you said you stole from the Lord? Why don’t you have it now? I think you are lying to save your worthless carcass!”
“I told you that I opened a gate to the next world and that I threw it to a man who appeared at the gate. He stands before you now.”
Podarge turned her head as an eagle swivels hers, and she glared at Wolff. “I see no horn. I see only some tough stringy meat behind a black beard!”
“He says that another band of gworl stole it from him,” Kickaha replied. “He was chasing after them to get it back when the batfaces captured him and you so magnanimously rescued him. Release us, gracious and beautiful Podarge, and we will get the horn back. With it, we will be in a position to fight the Lord. He can be beaten! He may be the powerful Lord, but he is not all-powerful! If he were, he would have found us and the horn long ago!”
Podarge stood up, preened her wings, and walked down the steps from the throne and across the floor to the cage. She did not bob as a bird does when walking but strode stiff-legged.
“I wish that I could believe you,” she said in a lower but just as intense voice. “If only I could! I have waited through the years and the centuries and the millenia, oh, so long that my heart aches to think of the time! If I thought that the weapons for striking back at him had finally come within my hands …”
She stared at them, held her wings out before her, and said, “See! ‘My hands,’ I said. But I do not have hands, nor the body that was once mine. That …” And she burst into a raging invective that made Wolff shrink. It was not the words but the fury, bordering on divinity or mindlessness, that made him grow cold.
“If the Lord can be overthrown—and I believe he can—you will be given back your human body,” Kickaha said when she had finished.
She panted with a clench of her anger and stared at them with the lust of murder. Wolff felt that all was lost, but her next words showed that the passion was not for them.
“The old Lord has been gone for a long time, so the rumor says. I sent one of my pets to investigate, and she came back with a strange tale. She said that there is a new Lord there, but she did not know whether or not it was the same Lord in a new body. I sent her back to the Lord, who refused my pleas to be given my rightful body again. So it does not matter whether or not there is another Lord. He is just as evil and hateful as the old one, if he is indeed not the old one. But I must know!
“First, whoever now is the Lord must die. Then I will find out if he had a new body or not. If the old Lord has left this universe, I will track him through the worlds and find him!”
“You can’t do that without the horn,” Kickaha said. “It and it alone opens the gate without a counter-device in the other world.”
“What have I to lose?” Podarge said. “If you are lying and betray me, I will have you in the end, and the hunt might be fun. If you mean what you say, then we will see what happens.”
She spoke to the eagle beside her, and it opened the gate. Kickaha and Wolff followed the harpy across the cave to a great table with chairs around it. Only then did Wolff see that the chamber was a treasure house; the loot of a world was piled up in it. There were large open chests crammed with gleaming jewels, pearl necklaces, and golden and silver cups of exquisite shape. There were small figurines of ivory and of some shining hard-grained black wood. There were magnificent paintings. Armor and weapons of all kinds, except firearms were piled carelessly at various places.
Podarge commanded them to sit down in ornately wrought chairs with carved lion’s feet. She beckoned with a wing, and out of the shadows stepped a young man. He carried a heavy golden tray on which were three finely chiseled cups of crystal-quartz. These were fashioned as leaping fish with wide open mouths; the mouths were filled with a rich dark red wine.
“One of her lovers,” Kickaha whispered in answer to Wolff’s curious stare at the handsome blond youth. “Carried by her eagles from the level known as Dracheland or Teutonia. Poor fellow! But it’s better than being eaten alive by her pets, and he always has the hope of escaping to make his life bearable.”
Kickaha drank and breathed out satisfaction at the heavy but blood-brightening taste. Wolff felt the wine writhe as if alive. Podarge gripped the cup between the tips of her two wings and lifted it to her lips.
“To the death and damnation of the Lord. Therefore, to your success!”<
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The two drank again. Podarge put her cup down and flicked Wolff lightly across the face with the ends of the feathers of one wing. “Tell me your story.”
Wolff talked for a long while. He ate from slices of a roast goat-pig, a light brown bread, and fruit, and he drank the wine. His head began reeling, but he talked on and on, stopping only when Podarge questioned him about something. Fresh torches replaced the old and still he talked.
Abruptly, he awoke. Sunshine was coming in from another cave, lighting the empty cup and the table on which his head had lain while he had slept. Kickaha, grinning, stood by him.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Podarge wants us to get started early. She’s eager for revenge. And I want to get out before she changes her mind. You don’t know how lucky we are. We’re the only prisoners she’s ever given freedom.”
Wolff sat up and groaned with the ache in his shoulders and neck. His head felt fuzzy and a little heavy, but he had had worse hangovers.
“What did you do after I fell asleep?” he said.
Kickaha smiled broadly. “I paid the final price. But it wasn’t bad, not bad at all. Rather peculiar at first, but I’m an adaptable fellow.”
They walked out of the cave into the next one and from thence onto the wide lip of stone jutting from the cliff. Wolff turned for one last look and saw several eagles, green monoliths, standing by the entrance to the inner cave. There was a flash of white skin and black wings as Podarge crossed stiff-legged before the giant birds.
“Come on,” Kickaha said. “Podarge and her pets are hungry. You didn’t see her try to get the gworl to plead for mercy. I’ll say one thing for them, they didn’t whine or cry. They spat at her.”
Wolff jumped as a ripsaw scream came from the cave mouth. Kickaha took Wolff’s arm and urged him into a fast walk. More jagged cries tore from eagle beaks, mingled with the ululations from beings in fear and pain of death.
“That’d be us, too,” Kickaha said, “if we hadn’t had something to trade for our lives.”
They began climbing and by nightfall were three thousand feet higher. Kickaha untied the knapsack of leather from his back and produced various articles. Among these was a box of matches, with one of which he started a fire. Meat and bread and a small bottle of the Rhadamanthean wine followed. The bag and the contents were gifts from Podarge.
“We’ve got about four days of climbing before we get to the next level,” the youth said. “Then, the fabulous world of Amerindia.”
Wolff started to ask questions, but Kickaha said that he ought to explain the physical structure of the planet. Wolff listened patiently, and when he had heard Kickaha out, he did not scoff. Moreover, Kickaha’s explanation corresponded with what he had so far seen. Wolff’s intentions to ask how Kickaha, obviously a native of Earth, had come here were frustrated. The youth, complaining that he had not slept for a long time and had had an especially exhausting night, fell asleep.
Wolff stared for awhile into the flames of the dying fire. He had seen and experienced much in a short time, but he had much more to go through. That is, he would if he lived. A whooping cry rose from the depths, and a great green eagle screamed somewhere in the air along the mountain-face.
He wondered where Chryseis was tonight. Was she alive and if so, how was she faring? And where was the horn? Kickaha had said that they had to find the horn if they were to have any success at all. Without it, they would inevitably lose.
So thinking, he too fell asleep.
Four days later, when the sun was in the midpoint of its course around the planet, they pulled themselves over the rim. Before them was a plain that rolled for at least 160 miles before the horizon dropped it out of sight. To both sides, perhaps a hundred miles away, were mountain ranges. These might be large enough to cause comparison with the Himalayas. But they were mice beside the monolith, Abharhploonta, that dominated this section of the multilevel planet. Abharhploonta was, so Kickaha claimed, fifteen hundred miles from the rim, yet it looked no more than fifty miles away. It towered fully as high as the mountain up which they had just climbed.
“Now you get the idea,” Kickaha said. “This world is not pear-shaped. It’s a planetary Tower of Babylon. A series of staggered columns, each smaller than the one beneath it. On the very apex of this Earth-sized tower is the palace of the Lord. As you can see, we have a long way to go.
“But it’s a great life while it lasts! I’ve had a wild and wonderful time! If the Lord struck me at this moment, I couldn’t complain. Although, of course, I would, being human and therefore bitter about being cut off in my prime! And believe me, my friend, I’m prime!”
Wolff could not help smiling at the youth. He looked so gay and buoyant, like a bronze statue suddenly touched into animation and overflowingly joyous because he was alive.
“Okay!” Kickaha cried. “The first thing we have to do is get some fitting clothes for you! Nakedness is chic in the level below, but not on this one. You have to wear at least a breechcloth and a feather in your hair; otherwise the natives will have contempt for you. And contempt here means slavery or death for the contemptible.”
He began walking along the rim, Wolff with him.
“Observe how green and lush the grass is and how it is as high as our knees, Bob. It affords pasture for browsers and grazers. But it is also high enough to conceal the beasts that feed on the grass-eaters. So beware! The plains puma and the dire wolf and the striped hunting dog and the giant weasel prowl through the grasses. Then there is Felis Atrox, whom I call the atrocious lion. He once roamed the plains of the North American Southwest, became extinct there about 10,000 years ago. He’s very much alive here, one-third larger than the African lion and twice as nasty.
“Hey, look there! Mammoths!”
Wolff wanted to stop to watch the huge gray beasts, which were about a quarter of a mile away. But Kickaha urged him on. “There’re plenty more around, and there’ll be times when you wish there weren’t. Spend your time watching the grass. If it moves contrary to the wind, tell me.”
They walked swiftly for two miles. During this time, they came close to a band of wild horses. The stallions whickered and raced up to investigate them, then stood their ground, pawing and snorting, until the two had passed. They were magnificent animals, tall, sleek, and black or glossy red or spotted white and black.
“Nothing of your Indian pony there,” Kickaha said. “I think the Lord imported nothing but the best stock.”
Presently, Kickaha stopped by a pile of rocks. “My marker,” he said. He walked straight inward across the plain from the cairn. After a mile they came to a tall tree. The youth leaped up, grabbed the lowest branch, and began climbing. Halfway up, he reached a hollow and brought out a large bag. On returning, Kickaha took out of the bag two bows, two quivers of arrows, a deerskin breech-cloth, and a belt with a skin scabbard in which was a long steel knife.
Wolff put on the loincloth and belt and took the bow and quiver.
“You know how to use these?” Kickaha said. “I’ve practised all my life.”
“Good. You’ll get more than one chance to put your skill to the test. Let’s go. We’ve many a mile to cover.”
They began wolf-trotting: run a hundred steps, walk a hundred steps. Kickaha pointed to the range of mountains to their right.
“There is where my tribe, the Hrowakas, the Bear People, live. Eighty miles away. Once we get there, we can take it easy for awhile, and make preparations for the long journey ahead of us.”
“You don’t look like an Indian,” Wolff said.
“And you, my friend, don’t look like a sixty-six year-old man, either. But here we are. Okay. I’ve put off telling my story because I wanted to hear yours first. Tonight I’ll talk.”
They did not speak much more that day. Wolff exclaimed now and then at the animals he saw. There were great herds of bison, dark, shaggy, bearded, and far larger than their cousins of Earth. There were other herds of horses and a creature that looked like the pro
totype of the camel. More mammoths and then a family of steppe mastodons. A pack of six dire wolves raced alongside the two for awhile at a distance of a hundred yards. These stood almost as high as Wolff’s shoulder.
Kickaha seeing Wolff’s alarm, laughed and said, “They won’t attack us unless they’re hungry. That isn’t very likely with all the game around here. They’re just curious.”
Presently, the giant wolves curved away, their speed increasing as they flushed some striped antelopes out of a grove of trees.
“This is North America as it was a long time before the white man,” Kickaha said. “Fresh, spacious, with a multitude of animals and a few tribes roaming around.”
A flock of a hundred ducks flew overhead, honking. Out of the green sky, a hawk fell, struck with a thud, and the flock was minus one comrade. “The Happy Hunting Ground!” Kickaha cried. “Only it’s not so happy sometimes.”
Several hours before the sun went around the mountain, they stopped by a small lake. Kickaha found the tree in which he had built a platform.
“We’ll sleep here tonight, taking turns on watch. About the only animal that might attack us in the tree is the giant weasel, but he’s enough to worry about. Besides, and worse, there could be war parties.”
Kickaha left with his bow in hand and returned in fifteen minutes with a large buck rabbit. Wolff had started a small fire with little smoke; over this they roasted the rabbit. While they ate, Kickaha explained the topography of the country.
“Whatever else you can say about the Lord, you can’t deny he did a good job of designing this world. You take this level, Amerindia. It’s not really flat. It has a series of slight curves each about 160 miles long. These allow the water to run off, creeks and rivers and lakes to form. There’s no snow anywhere on the planet—can’t be, with no seasons and a fairly uniform climate. But it rains every day—the clouds come in from space somewhere.”